What types of demonstrations do you count?

We count public displays of protest that are not part of "regular business."
We typically do not include commemorative celebrations, historic reenactments,
fundraising events, townhalls, vigils, or political campaign rallies unless they
explicitly relate to a contemporary issue.

Where do you get your count estimates?

We record the most conservative attendance number from the news articles
that we link. We interpret “a dozen” as 10, “dozens” as 20, “hundreds” as 100, and
so forth. If an article mentions a demonstration but does not include an
attendance count, we note the demonstration but leave the count empty.

Why do some of your links lead to error pages?

Unfortunately, the internet is transient. While nothing disappears on the internet,
most things don't stay in the same place in perpetuity.
We have text archives of the linked articles that we reference, and we are currently
exploring how to best make these archives available.

Why are you doing this?

Protests and demonstrations represent one way to communicate to our elected leaders. Yet, it’s
easy to lose track of exactly where and when protests took place and how
many people participated. Additionally,
searching through and visualizing individual records can be quite a daunting task.
We hope that keeping a factual record of
ongoing demonstrations and making this data more accessible helps
citizens, journalists, and politicians make more compelling cases
for a diverse, empathetic, and kind country.

Who are you?

We are Tommy Leung and
Nathan Perkins, engineers and scientists with a keen
interest in civic responsibility and public policy. We started Count Love
in catharsis to 2016, and we continue active development during our free
time. During our not-so-free time, Tommy advances online privacy as a software engineer at
DuckDuckGo and Nathan develops novel techniques to record brain activity.
We hold completely unrelated PhDs (to each other and Count Love)—Tommy
in Engineering Systems from MIT, and Nathan in Computational Neuroscience
from Boston University. We met during overlapping stints at MIT while working
on our Masters in Technology and Policy, and we both did our
undergrads in sunny Los Angeles—Tommy in Engineering at Harvey Mudd,
and Nathan in Neuroscience at USC.

A few kind souls have occasionally mentioned/written about/featured Count Love and its data on the web: